Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them

I. CAGE ITEMS

This box should be fairly heavy. The door
never needs opened or undone. Bend the rim
into a square. Little danger to your
self—the room to be afforded him.

A looking glass hung up by a small chain—
your pet’s vanity exceeds belief. A
flimsily made affair is soon bitten
to pieces. Body of a cage. Many a
good monkey is killed by swallowing
fragments of glass. Rub on a coat of
maroon. A little ornamental topping.
Or Venetian Red, most suitable of
colors for a cage. All that remains
is to procure your monkey and put him in.

II. CLASSIFICATION

From the time my fingers were big enough
to manufacture fly-cages with hollowed
cork and pins—all other lines of
fancy well threshed out—Simians have held

great fascination. The schoolboy’s definition
is “the plural of monk.” Or humonculous.
Much is lacking in what might have been
told. I cannot pin. Great naturalists

have labored to show a relationship.
I cannot pin my credibility.
Below the average human idiot’s,
the head of a chimpanzee. I am drifting.

What might have been. A fertile source of
drollery. My fingers were big enough.

III. AILMENTS

Disease—Symptoms of Indisposition—

Quinsy—Good Riddance—a small apple

hollowed out—Toothache—Headache—treat him

as you would a child—Useful Article—

as you would—Broken Limbs—a human
being—Rheumatism—Rupture—Risk of

Being Bitten—first he should be en-
veloped—Treatment—in a bag—Costive-

ness—Biliousness—Monkeys Eating Their
Own Tails—a ready sale is better than
the nuisance—Excrement—the “Kill or Cure”
Treatment—treat him as you would a human

being—Simple Remedies—a small apple hollowed

out and plugged again is greedily devoured

IV. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

Savagely grabbed, the hand that has fed and
petted him all along. The very moment
novelty is lost, sit and write off an
advertisement to Exchange and Mart,

Bazaar. I haven’t always had the heart.
A passing menagerie generally

has a vacant cage. With an iron bar
a sharp and heavy blow. An exceedingly

human-like affair. As if we all of us
come at last to this. In skinning him
yourself you’ll find his hide fairly tough.
Put him in a natural posture. A bit

of dried moss, artificial leaf you might
purchase at the milliners. Keep him in full light.

The source material for these pieces is Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them, Arthur Patterson’s 1888 handbook, which was published in response to the colonialist British fashion of adopting exotic animals without any idea of how to properly provide care for them. These poems erase and rearrange the text into sonnet form. The poems were originally published in The Florida Review (43.2, Fall 2019) and were the winner of the Humboldt Poetry Prize.

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There They Are

my mother, my father. Her skinny
blue wrists, his ear caressing a cigarette.     In the beginning,
it is already too late,    but there is hunger & no time
to waste.    All they need are six hands, three mouths, a clockwork
yearning for locks of their own, windows square & fresh.    In the beginning,
my cry breaks my father, who flushes red at my fall, opens my face in search
of his mother.          Grasses, grasses on a country
road, hawthorn up to their waists,
aflame.     The crying of no mothers. Temple bells hung
by the wind.    An October without moons,
a feeling I’ve been here before. Dew on the page.
Windows billowing   wax paper.
Fall’s charred eyelids.     Toes pressing down my own wet
imprint.    Begin the world without a bang.
Water, air,   the Earth split into an egg,
elements halved for light.      No mothers, just two figures on a bicycle
for one.   A sweaty country road. Stoves that won’t start,
boxes of damp matchsticks.     Strain of a blue wrist
untucking cigarettes from his lips
prayer of hands inside the ashes of mothers,
single finger curving to a hush.    Careful,
hold the glass up to one eye, split the nucleus
with the other, explosions muted by winged lungs.
Put down my pen.    Unfold my eyes. Count backwards
before legs, before longing, until I hit a snag in the web,
open,   to find my palm full of tears.
Once, there were no mothers. Trace the outline,
one, two, build a family from hunger.                   Listen, a cry, mine,
dragging her mother’s last breath up the jagged washboard as he soaps
my throat clean, baptizing his mother’s blackened lungs.
My mouth opens       to wake their beginning & just like that
blesses our downfall.
There, stretch the canvas, spread oil thin-thin
into our crevasses, what’s that in the distance?       No mother,
not the moon,      just six hands bent over a clock face with no opening,
porcelain spoons    raised to another’s lips,    tap – tap we widen
our insides until ink forks our edges.        In the beginning,
an October without night. Windows torn
open with flashlights. Hawthorn dawning a mother’s last breath.
Let me begin   again,

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Some Mornings

Some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

they are full of tiny battles, body pains, and aches

coffee grounds spilled in the crack of tile

egg shells crushed against your spine

Some mornings are not meant to be hopeful

the sun’s tyrant gaze slips in through the gaps

the ceiling fan is a switchblade to the ear

alley cats scream their war cries to the world

Some mornings are not meant to be calm

the throbbing skull of a night, water-deprived

echoes inside itself, a reminder that the body

desires equilibrium and safety in this storm

No, some mornings are not meant to be peaceful

yet the day moves on, mixing with the night

the truce made since the dawn of time

where worries unwind, where thought dissolves,

where the world is reminded that dreams live

beyond the body and the body is a dream.

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Echolocation & Proof

Echolocation

I begin with near-silence,

the droning refrigerator,

a dog barking far off.

You’ve just fallen asleep

as morning splinters

through the blinds.

He kicks off his boots,

braces himself on the dresser,

pulls at the leg of his jeans.

Something wakes you—

a knocked over jar of change,

a picture frame falling flat.

You must miss the feeling

of waking in the night

knowing exactly where

you are, hearing only

your brothers’ muffled voices

through the wall. Years later,

nights when my friends and I

stay up until dawn,

you’ll wake this way again

to laughter resonating

down the hall. One night,

to meet our girlfriends,

J. T. and I will sneak

to Arroyo Vista Park.

You’ll wedge a drumstick

in the window-track and wait

for our knock at the door.

After sending J. T. home,

you’ll say When it’s quiet, I know

somethin’ aint right. Because

this all feels close enough

to the truth, and because I have

no evidence I was made

the usual way—not even a picture

of you and my father together—

I’ve made this:

In splinters of

morning, you pull me from

his open mouth while he sleeps,

piece me together from handfuls

of his running breath, the small

sound of whitewater.

Proof

The fact is I was made

from what Whitman called

“father-stuff,” from a current

of you and from being held.

This—the raw physiology of it—

may explain why most fathers

think only of pushing their sons

into the world and most mothers

only of keeping them from it.

But the facts only tell us

half of every story, and never

the half we need. I have

a photograph taken just weeks

after I was born. I was

sleeping on your bare chest.

You were slouched in an armchair

with your fingers laced like rivulets

under my feet. These are facts—

even if you forgot, and even if all

I remember from being with you

before Arizona is the smell of

shop grease and dipping tobacco,

you once held me the way

a riverbed wants to hold a river.

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Two Lynchburg Poems

Riverside Park, Lynchburg

At Riverside Park off Rivermont Avenue,

Katy and I sit on a boulder viewing

the overcast valley where classmates

died leaping

from the 200-foot train trestle.

Every day my body betrays itself into

believing it’s dying, believing the pastor’s

words that homosexual boys

are destined for death.

Katy lights a cigarette as a canopy of leaves protects

us from the rain, says, “I wonder what it feels like to know

you’re going to die.” The train whistles

in the distance.

My mom pretended to die for attention

after she left me. For once I don’t feel her

absence in my body. For once

I feel kind of okay, like I won’t walk

up and down a foggy

Court Street at three a.m. in front of the Episcopal church,

crying and begging

God to make me straight so my father

doesn’t leave me too.

We walk back toward the car in the rain,

listening to the train chug pass in the distance

along the riverbank.

In the clearing between the path and the forest

a gathering of fireflies twinkles in the twilight, my prayers

burning in the trees.

My arms around Katy who, after smoking,

smells like my mom plummeting to earth

on a meteor.

A tear carves down the tracks of skin and leaps off

my jawline. My body simmers to smoke,

little fires,

this figure of ash.

[Driving away from Lynchburg]

Driving away from Lynchburg, realizing

the Blue Ridge is my home but not

where I’m meant to live,

a tiger swallowtail smears across

my windshield in powder yellow.

I too have wished to feel the painless

end, but a windshield

nebula requires a life, brittle

as the swallowtail’s chitin wings,

one the mountains can’t afford to lose.

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Insomnia

Night works a dark purple down the loom.

Again, I watch dawn unravel those rows,

a weaving and unweaving no less coy

than Penelope producing her burial shroud.

Please let today end. I am desperate to feel better

and know days will trudge past this point with me in tow.

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Two Poems

Breakfast with My Spiritual Advisor at Sunny Side Café

His first job out of school was working

as a hospital chaplain at Mercy,

sat bedside with the dying

for a living, and he tells me what

it was like to wait for the joints

in their fingers to go loose like he

was letting the fish steal the hook to swim

back off into scripture with.

Out down the road

the early service releases and a ringing

tower sends off the congregation

with the old, irregular style bell

ringing that signifies to me an actual

human is somewhere down there tugging

one end of some rope that crashes

a lead tongue against the hollow insides

of cast iron. You hear that, I say,

pointing with a slice of bacon to the air,

and he says they’re an expression of joy

meant to help us forget our sadness

for a minute or so, and I say

it’s there though, pointing at my heart

with the bacon, the sadness, even

when we let ourselves forget it,

same as it’s always been,

the heartache and the thousand

natural shocks that flesh is heir to.

He says he prefers Blake

over Shakespeare any day of the week

when it comes to either sadness or joy,

To see a world in a grain of sand, he says

and a heaven in a wild flower.

When the ringing quits

I say I prefer Frank Stanford, which

is a damn lie, but I don’t tell him I actually

prefer my wife’s hair slinking down her back

though I do, or that I prefer sneaking out at night

for a cigar on the porch in early fall,

or that I’ll always prefer to bury the light

and put on the darkness like a pair of wool socks

with a hole in one of the big toes

over Milton or Jesus or Sappho.

There are houses so broken

they aren’t worth fixing, and sometimes

that’s exactly how I feel. Waterlog turned

to dryrot turned so useless you couldn’t

sink a nail. Sometimes my wife whispers

she loves me from the other room and all

I hear are bells. Other times, there’s only

a lonely wind passing through the storm door

whispering almost nothing at all.

Art Fair

I came to meander through open-air booths erected

in the name of self-taught metallurgical fiends

who curl lengths of iron into abstract lawn décor,

in the name of grade school art teachers

who scrawl feverish landscapes into the night,

in the name of potters who breathe and bellow fire

into backyard kilns, in the name of woodworkers

who turn burlwood into bowls for still-life prints.

I came here because there exist people with second lives

that last longer than the first, and because we all

eventually fall into the shapeless crowds who wander

these grassy lanes like ghosts who’ve fallen

into portraits tacked in museum galleries. If I fail

to bargain down a smear of moon oil on canvas, just watch

me move in on that bloodwood cutting board,

or that hand-twined chandelier, because there’s a price

in my head that’s incapable of change and all it takes

is a bit of small talk and to look someone in the eyes.

I once convinced a man at a roadside fireworks tent

to knock ten bucks off a 12-pack of Mississippi Gambler

mortar shells so I could paint the night with more color

than you can imagine, and he just sat back into his body

and his impossibly quiet lawn chair. Just sat back down

into a life defined by a carnival tent of powder and fuse.

Listen, I came here to feel a rougher art rush through

each one of my eye’s billion vessels, because color

and form, and because far from the Louvres

of the world artists still find ways to fashion

grief into the arcades of other people’s hearts.

Because somewhere near these tents meat smoke rises

from pork fat spit into embers, and because somewhere

there is a moveable stage upon which a bass player

slowly unlatches his case, and because soon enough

the lights of this art fair will begin to dim, and each

one of us will drift back to the silence of our homes

where we will each unearth from slumber the stud-finder

level, hammer and a single nail in order to hang

an image upon the dining room wall

where before there was nothing, until now.

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Like Fireworks, Far Off

As if chrysanthemum fireworks flaring

gold, blue, red—brief, phosphorescent

amoebas throb, pulse. Next, a galaxy

of green stars spins out of existence.

Then, a flurry of supernovas

flare and fade. After, a comet-like

streaking ends in a white flash. All the while,

a far off chorus of oohs and ahs

mingles with some last applause.

Then, for a moment, it seems like dawn.

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The Doctor Looks at My Blood Work

Says: There are blacksmiths in your eyes.

Maybe this explains the forging.

The way I flatten heat. Bang

earth against answer until

I call it knife. Nodding to bellows

in their muddy howls. Told them

chemistry separates from slag.

I speak in gardens. Interrogate

the estrogen and her rising weeds.

From space this earth is more red

than any astronaut will speak.

In the dirt, the iron begs to be born.

I kneel before anvil and pray.

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Category: Poetry